Design Science
Fuller's discipline of solving global problems by applying generalized principles through whole-system, future-oriented design.
Design Science is the name Buckminster Fuller gave to his method for inventing solutions to humanity's largest problems. He called the full discipline Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS). "Comprehensive" means taking the widest view—zooming out to the larger, slower systems that provide context before modeling the smaller, faster components inside a design, moving from wholes to parts without omitting anything critical. "Anticipatory" means visualizing a preferred future and working deliberately toward it, using conceptual tools Fuller contributed such as the trimtab, precession, and the creation of new models rather than reform of old ones.
Unlike "pure" science, which sometimes claims to be value-free, design science is explicitly value-laden: it is the structuring of environments in preferred directions determined by human values. As Fuller's collaborator Medard Gabel put it in Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone, a design scientist does not wait to be hired but takes personal initiative to solve the problems experience has shown are important for the betterment of humanity. Fuller's own 1927 decision to work "always and only for all humanity" was the founding act of this stance.
The method rests on discovering and using generalized principles—the "laws of nature" describing interrelationships among system components, which Fuller held obtain in every special case without exception. A central example is doing more with less, a trend Fuller named ephemeralization (Arnold Toynbee's "etherealization"), widely evident in sustainable and regenerative design. Fuller's World Game is design science in action: participants collaborate on solutions to pressing global problems on behalf of all humanity. Michael Ben-Eli's essay "Design Science, A Framework for Change" summarizes the same process across Fuller's many endeavors. The hoped-for consequence of widespread CADS practice is greater alignment of humanity with universal patterns and with one another.
See Also
- R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
- 50 Years of the Design Science Revolution (link) — related program
- Medard Gabel (link) — collaborator and design-science theorist
- World Game Institute (link) — design science in practice
Sources
- Design Science (Buckminster Fuller Institute)
- Design Science Framework (The Permaculture Project)